He paused, as if pained.
“And by every account, Oliver was the one who gave her the drink.”
Grace could hear Aunt Clove screaming through the walls. Lillie had snuck Grace up to her bedroom. They lay on Lillie’s bed together. Lillie’s back was to Grace, but Grace could see the tears streaking down her cheeks like rain on glass.
“Your father is getting Oliver the best possible lawyer,” Grace said, stroking her cousin’s hair.
“But—Oliver. They think hedidthis,” Lillie said.
“We will find out who really did,” Grace said fiercely.
“Our family is ruined,” Lillie said.
Grace didn’t answer that. She knew it was likely true, and she knew intimately what that felt like. She could not bear to see it happen to Lillie, too.
Grace plaited Lillie’s hair the way she used to when they were children. She didn’t want to bother Lillie with the additional news that she had no place to stay. Aunt Clove would never allow her to remain in the Carter house, especially not now.
Should she call home and ask for more money?
Not that her parents had much to go around.
But—her mother. Her mother needed to know what was happening.
“Can I use your telephone?” she asked Lillie. “Somewhere private?”
“Father’s office,” she said.
Grace slipped down to Uncle Reginald’s mahogany-paneled office. The lights were dim, and an unnatural sadness hung like a hush throughout the house. As if it, too, knew someone had died.
She saw the wooden secretary desk that Oliver had once carved his initials in as a boy and then tried to blame on Lillie. Grace ran her fingers over the old etching his small fingers had once made, then dialed her father’s restaurant.
“Grace?” her mother said. “Are you all right?”
She’d seen the papers, but it wasn’t until Grace told her that the police had come for Oliver that her mother gasped.
“Come home,” Nell said immediately.
“I can’t just… leave now, Mama. Surely you know that I could never leave Lillie and Oliver, no matter what.”
“Put Clove on the phone.”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Grace said.
“Then you get on that train and come back here immediately,” her mother demanded.
Grace heard the crackle of rage in her mother’s voice, and it soothed her a little. It was that fire of her mother’s that she loved and feared in equal measure, one that had dimmed to barely glowing embers after Walt’s troubles. Hearing it again made Grace come alive.
But she was no longer a girl.
“I can’t,” she said. “Not yet, Mama.”
“Grace—”
She hung up the telephone.
Grace sat down at her uncle’s desk and contemplated her options. She knew staying at the Carter house was not one of them. What other females did she know? Frannie certainly wouldn’t entertain the thought of having her—the idea almost made Grace laugh. Before, she might have asked to stay with Harriet.
But what was she to do?
